


now you must endure

by velvetcrowbars



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Drabble Collection, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Blue Lions Route, Gen, Non-Linear Narrative, POV Multiple, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-19
Updated: 2020-08-24
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:41:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25983802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/velvetcrowbars/pseuds/velvetcrowbars
Summary: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd, sole heir to the throne of the Holy Kingdom of Fahrgus, has been executed.what remains of the Blue Lions, in the in-between.
Relationships: Blue Lions Students & Blue Lions Students (Fire Emblem)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 34





	1. to break:to mend

**Author's Note:**

> i've had pieces of this massive fic floating around since i first finished the game LAST august, but it would be a much bigger undertaking to piece it all together right now than i have the nerve for. 
> 
> not sure how often this will update as i'm slowly dragging myself through editing each section. however it does cover stuff from immediately pre-ts to right before post-ts begins. from all the blue lions' individual povs so. it's....a lot. 
> 
> fair warning that it's sad. bc i love being sad. anyway here's wonderw

The word scorches like a flame through summer-dried grass, the extenuations and details pluming like great ribbons of smoke over the kingdom. In much the same manner as the news had spread about Garreg Mach, about the capital, about Lady Rhea’s disappearance – it is difficult to comprehend over the pounding of the Empire’s sword at their doorstep.

Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd, sole heir to the throne of the Holy Kingdom of Fahrgus, has been executed.

Annette Dominic hears it over breakfast, her uncle’s face bent in quiet misery over his toast.

Her mother’s shaking her head, resignation apparent as she tucks into the porridge without looking up. They’re all still in their nightgowns, Annette’s head fuzzy with the warmth of sleep, her hair loose and falling in an unkempt wave against her cheeks. Upstairs, in her bedroom, Mercedes is still curled around Annette’s pillows, her brow pinched even in sleep. As if bracing for when morning comes. They’d arrived just two nights prior, exhaustion dug into their bones. Their clothes still smelled of the monastery as it burned. Like crumbling stone, like a pain long since buried and forgotten.

_Beheaded_ , her uncle mutter-speaks, the word like a curse on his tongue. _How horrible. What are we to do now?_

Annette stares at them both for a moment. She thinks she manages an _excuse me_ , before rounding the corner of the hallway and making for the door.

Even in spring, even this far south as her childhood home in Dominic territory, warmth has yet to leach back into the soil. The air is still chilly enough to sting her cheeks. She doesn’t stop until she reaches the edge of the orchards, marching forward until she finds it tucked away, a swath of branches that breaks away to a view of the lake. It’s a place her father had shown her, years ago, so many years ago now it felt like she might’ve dreamt it. Dreamt of his weathered palms holding hers as they knelt among the rocks, dropping small stones to watch the water ripple far below. 

_“What was he like?”_ she’d asked.

There was stew for dinner that night, with duck and sweet sugar snap peas. She remembers it. Dimitri had spilled a drop in his lap and her eyes kept catching on it as he spoke. Across the table, Felix stamped on Sylvain’s toes hard enough to rattle the table. After an attempt to quiet them Dimitri had smiled at her, but it only just touched the corners of his mouth. Ashe and Ingrid were bent over a tactics book together, their words rushed, excited, almost heated in debate. Dedue had his gaze fixed through the mess hall window’s, his jacket a pool of fabric in Mercedes lap while she hemmed at a rip in his sleeve, humming a choir hymn beneath the mess hall’s bustle.

Dimitri’s laugh was gentle when he’d said, _“He spoke of few things, really, but often of you.”_

_Always of you._

Annette crouches down and curls her face against her knees, crushes herself so far inward she is sure her heart will pop. Above, the clouds churn a murky steel, and a pattering of rain drops like tears onto her pale, bare feet.

-

There’s much scrambling, in the immediate aftermath of it all.

The Empire’s army runs rampant as a beast with water-sickness, eating away at the small villages first, then the towns. There aren’t many cities to conquer, but the few ones scattered enough to bear weapons fall just the same. All anyone knows of the east is that all word out of Daphnel soon ends.

You remember bits of this, in the immediate aftermath of it all. You remember catching rumors and running from them. Quick. Fast. _Faster_. You have to move faster. You remember the little girl who left dried apricots on the rocks behind her home. You remember seeing me clearly for the first time from across the river as you soaked your face. You were scrubbing the blood from your chest and throat with the blunted edges of your fingers. Hunger that is more than hunger was just beginning to eat what was left of your smile.

You gave me a name. After all these years you dared to speak it aloud. I’ve always wondered what it might sound like: the echo of your memory of me. Because it is all I am – all I shall ever be.

The reflection of your face in the river wavers. _I do not want this. I never wanted this._ _I’ll do anything – anything. Anything._

“I know. You will,” you hear me tell yourself. “And for it you shall burn.”

-

“Come. Quickly now.”

The air tastes like cinders, falling like snowflakes that collect in crumpled piles upon the dead villager’s clothes. Ashe keeps his eyes on the ground as he walks, the spot of Gilbert’s hair locked in his periphery. It’s familiar, in some strange, disorienting way. Trailing behind flame wick hair, rushing to catch up across the training ground’s courtyard, drenched in sunlight. The hot press of tears is a threat behind his eyes, but with one solid blink, they dissipate.

They’re somewhere in Empire territory – what was once one of the small hamlets outside of Arianrhod, now but a smudge of crushed dust on the map. A shiver rakes a cruel scrape down his spine, sending his teeth chattering as if to spite his layers of clothes and cloak tugged over his shoulders.

Gilbert stops at the edge of what might’ve once been a bakery, three walls still intact, one half crumbled. He peers inside, the harsh lines of his face carved darker by the fading light. The sun is but a crescent of blood on the horizon, red through the trees on the hill. In the east, the Horsebow moon clings to the sky like a sharp sliver of bone.

When Gilbert turns back his eyes are cold-tempered, iron-clad, but his voice is soft, like gravel underfoot. He doesn’t meet Ashe’s eyes before disappearing around the ruined building’s edge, the call over his shoulder almost carried off by the wind whipping down from the hillside.

“We rest here tonight.”

They unpack and settle in for the evening in silence. Ashe gathers any dry planks of wood, Gilbert begins to strip down their packs and spare clothes to sleep on. There’s a familiarity in this, too – Ashe knows this process, these broken down steps that grind splinters into his knuckles, like a comfort.

He lights the smallest flame between his fingers beneath the old wood and dried leaves. It’s a simple spell, one most anyone can perform, given enough practice. Annette had taught it to him one morning as she watched him shivering in the cathedral’s drafty pews during choir practice. He’d always been susceptible to the cold. His fingernails were already half-baby blue pale when she’d clasped them in her own, trying to shake some semblance of warmth back in. From behind them, Sylvain’d swung an arm over his shoulder, something suggestive on the tip of his tongue as Annette batted him away, and Ashe feels something welling up again, and he’s so sick of crying, of falling on the verge of it at the drop of a hat. He smothers it as best he can – twists knots into the ripped quilt Gilbert had given him on his first night, focusing on its gauzy warmth until his thoughts slow.

“Ashe.”

The sound of his own name is enough to make him flinch. If Gilbert takes notice, he gives no indication. His eyes are focused, centered on the fire’s burning embers, buried deep. He continues as soon as Ashe looks up.

“Tomorrow, we go north. Search the patch of woods there. Then, we’ll head east again.”

Ashe nods. His head feels weak and loose where it sits on his neck, the muscles tender and tense when he digs his shaking fingers in. It occurs to him, for the hundredth time in any handful of days, how fragile they are – pliant, even, to the head of an arrow. The fall of an axe blade, cleaving.

_don’t think about it don't think about him don't think of Dimitri’s blood on the floor don’t think of his smile pulled hurt around the edges don't think of what you should’ve done you should’ve done more, done better, done anything at all and now–_

Now. The rotten wood floor under his side, his pack as a rough pillow under his ear. His bow within arm’s reach, arrows in their quiver tucked against his chest. The fire is a crackle of light against Gilbert’s rigid back.

"Sir Gilbert,” he says, hating the way the words waver. “What if he really is dead?”

A pause. There’s the clip of steel on stone, wet against metal – he’s sharpening something. His hunting knife. “I believe that he is not.”

“But if he is?”

The hesitation is tangible, as sharp as flint. Gilbert does little to hide the grief edging into his voice, an uninvited guest. 

“Then we find another way.”

Ashes closes his eyes. In the woods blanketing the hillside, the wolves begin to howl.


	2. to leave:to return

On a crisp spring day, in a crinkled and dusty backstreet of Fhirdiad, Dedue wakes up a dead man.

His limbs are stiff, the inside of his abdomen like petrified wood beneath the swath of neat bandage swaddling him together. When he attempts to move his right arm, his fingers twinge and tingle. His left arm does not move at all. The room is low-roofed, dark. In the guttering light of a cluster of candles, he can see the outline of a figure in a lazy slump against the wall. A wave of sickness rolls through him, but as his stomach heaves he finds it hollow and acrid.

He tries to sit up, but the pain is like a shock of cold water dumped into his chest, frigid and paralyzing, so cold it burns. Aching, a phantom touch crawling up his hand, fingers clawing at his clothes. A desperate sound in his ear, muffled, as if passing through a wrap of cotton. Blood in his eyes, in his mouth, coating the underside of his tongue. Palms cupping the sides of his face, trembling. Someone holding him. Someone being ripped away.

 _Mother,_ he thinks, at first. _His Highness_ comes second.

 _Dimitri_.

Dedue’s every muscle shakes with the effort it takes to even lift his head, his torso moving as if some separate piece, unattached. A wreath of pain spindles up his elbow when he leans against it as a crutch, only to end up buckling back down again as it becomes unbearable.

“Wouldn’t try that, if I were you.”

A shadow in the far corner of the room speaks. Her voice is the punch of a scraping fist through rock. She speaks in a language Dedue only hears now in his dreams. She falls forward, elbows coming to rest on knees. The light hits her in strange places. All he can see is the brilliant blue-green of her eyes, a grizzled scar mottling her upper lip the color of death. Like cream tinged with blood. Dedue stares at her, looking for the words only to find there are none.

 _“How?”_ he wants to say. _“For how long?”_

What comes out of his mouth is: “Where is he?”

Silence. Then, a chuckle. It is surprisingly airy.

“You should be dead, kid. Try to act like it a little while longer and maybe your body will come back to you.”

Dedue feels as if he hasn’t had water in weeks. It may not be far from the truth. Every piece of his tattered body cries for him to move, to drag himself to the window, hollow out his bones. _Anything._ Anything to get back.

The words scrape themselves out of his barren throat a second time.

“Where is he?”

When she sighs the light catches on the colors stitched to her cuffs. The meaning comes back to him in pieces. Subtle enough to remain unnoticed by unwatchful eyes. Bright enough to be an act of defiance. A prayer to the god of war, an offering of oneself in exchange for protection.

“You’re not going to stop asking until I tell you. Is that it?”

He nods. His neck gives a precarious creak. She massages her thumb against her temple. The light catches the scars there, too.

“Long gone,” she says, another sigh carrying the sound along.

“Safe?”

He doesn’t want it to be a question. He wants her to be an echo, hollow, loud enough to shatter over the confines of the room.

The woman from Duscur says nothing.

-

Felix still isn’t back.

It’s long past sunset by now, well past dinner and the family’s nightly sips of spice rum and wine in the parlor. The Duke and attending lords had been locked in the study since the last traces of light left the sky. Sylvain used to press his ear to that study door when he was a child, trying to pick out his father’s voice among muted conversation within. He never could. By the year he turned ten, he stopped trying.

The snow’s coming down in an earnest effort to suffocate them, as it always does once the sky cracks open in the final months of winter. His feet ache from where he stands at the window, and Sylvain longs for his bed, for a warm embrace to fall into. The itch crawling under his skin says one of the kitchen girls had been watching him from under her downturned lashes all night, that there are fewer better solutions to a problem than that which it desires.

Yet the entrance to the Fraldarius estate remains empty. So Sylvain refolds his arms, settles in against the windowsill, and waits.

It isn’t long until Ingrid rounds the corner down the hall, and he knows it’s her by the way her footsteps fall, by the way she lingers at the corner frame, watching his back. She doesn’t say anything, and Sylvain doesn’t think about why. When she does approach, she still says nothing, joining him on the opposite window edge in silence.

“Aren’t you off to bed soon?” She asks.

Sylvain shrugs. The hem around his shoulders is looser than he’s used to. The uniform from the Officer’s Academy sat snug everywhere, but they’d burned it with the rest of their old clothes after reaching the nearest village. That’d been moons ago.

And if Sylvain’s been sloughing half his meals onto Ingrid’s plate, nobody need be the wiser.

“I’ll go once I know I won’t wake up to a frozen Fraldarius knocking on my door soon as I put my candle out,” he answers.

Before it might’ve earned him one of Ingrid’s quiet laughs. The kind she saves for when it’s just the two of them. It’d be more than he deserves, given the circumstances.

But Ingrid doesn't laugh. In Sylvain’s periphery, the green of her eyes is frosted with the snow’s reflection. They sit and watch the it collect in the eves. They’ve both grown better at this: letting themselves be quiet. Ingrid breaks the silence first, again.

“You should go home, Sylvain.”

 _Home_ – he wonders how she doesn’t choke on the word in her mouth. Home is his father’s realm, Sreng draped over them, breathing down their neck. Home is one empty room after another, his brother’s fingerprints left on every door, every sword hilt. His father beating something already broken.

“And what about you?” he says, in lieu of an actual response.

The edges of Ingrid’s mouth tighten. She’s scowling at him, but he doesn’t turn his head to see it. Outside, the snow piles up in big hunks of powder over the trimmed bush tops, and Sylvain staves off the fresh, unbidden wave of worry that rises up within him. At least that, in some ways, will always be a certainty.

“My duty is here,” Ingrid says, after a while, her words the shape of a finger curling into a fist.

“And mine isn’t?”

Ingrid shifts, and the whole manner shifts with her, a sharp creak beneath her boot. Through the trees comes a flicker of movement, as someone who isn’t Felix stumbles out of the woods.

-

You cannot go home.

You try to wash it away. Gut the insides of your mind like a fish, hold your head beneath the river. There’s a hole in your head where the water gets in. A hole in your head, your Highness! No, you cannot

go home. Not like this. A beast has no home. A beast has a grave, and the grave is the ground on which it walks. A beast has no place to go except within itself.

Because isn’t that what he always called you? Not always. _Not always,_ a very small voice says. It’s speaking from the back of a great cavernous room. You drown out its words with mine.

Doesn’t matter. The truth has always been there, buried in the empty plot you keep between your heart and lungs, within yourself. Nobody is there but you. Nobody’s there but us. You cannot go home.

But you can ensure the rest of them can’t either.


End file.
